Advances in computers, processing, communications, and networks have lead to an appreciable change in the manner in which information is represented in these systems. In particular, the concept of a document has changed appreciably in tandem with the evolution of computer systems and networks. For example, in the early days of computing, a document was basically limited to numbers, text, and a few special characters as represented in the ASCII or EBCIDIC formats. The concept of a document however has evolved to include features such as images, video, sound, and pages and portions of pages that can have multiple renditions. In short, documents have become more application-like.
One result of the increased complexity of machine-readable documents is the commensurate increase in size of these documents as stored in a machine-based memory. Quite simply, as the size of a document increases, the more memory it takes to store that document, the longer it takes to transmit that document over a network, and the longer it takes to download that document.
To address these and other problems associated with larger documents, documents (and files containing multiple documents) may be compressed, thereby decreasing the amount of storage such a document uses, decreasing the time that it takes to transmit the document over a network, and decreasing the time that it takes a recipient of the transmitted document to download the document. One such compressed format known in the art is the ZIP file format. Using one of a number of commercially available ZIP programs, a document, or a file containing multiple documents, wherein such document or documents may include text, graphics, video content, sound content, and other information, may be compressed into a ZIP file. Alternatively, by using one of a number of available programming languages, and by following the specification of a ZIP file format, one can write code that creates a ZIP file. After the creation of a ZIP file, any user can download and read the compressed file by running a ZIP file program to uncompress the file.
Page descriptor language formats are also used extensively in connection with document preparation and handling. One example page descriptor language format is the Portable Document Format (PDF) developed by the Adobe Corporation, San Jose, Calif. PDF files and documents provide for reliable electronic document distribution and exchange. When displayed, Adobe PDF files look exactly like the original documents because the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of the source document is preserved—regardless of the application and platform that originally created the document. An Adobe software product is used to create a PDF document, and the Adobe Acrobat or Reader is used to render and view a PDF document.